Perth’s homegrown futsal stars ready to take on UEFA Champions League and prove ‘hammer-throwers’ tag wrong

Perth Saltires are the dominant force in Scottish futsal – this week they are ready to take on the UEFA Champions League.

The Scottish champions jetted out to Slovakia this week for their qualifying group and will face three matches across the next four days.

Their squad is very much homegrown too with the majority coming through the youth setup and hailing from Perth itself.

Of their 14 players, only Dundee-based Ahmed Aloulou – formerly of Alloa Athletic – isn’t from the Fair City while Saltires also have the likes of ex-Dundee United kid Scott Smith in their ranks.

Homegrown

First up is Estonian champions Cosmos on Wednesday before facing hosts and top seeds Lucenec on Thursday and Encamp of Andorra on Saturday.

“We’ve got a squad of 14 going which is bigger than previously,” explained PYF Saltires’ Kyle Ballingall, who also captains the Scotland national team.

“Nine of those players have come through the youth academy at PYF and we have five players from our Colts team who play in the Dundee regional league.

“So our team is almost all Perth-based, apart from Ahmed Aloulou. Thirteen out of 14 are Perth-based and pretty much homegrown.

“That’s what we’ve always wanted to do so we’re looking forward to it.

“It’s now time to get on court and put all the hard work into practice.”

Hammer-throwers?

Preparation has seen Saltires take on Irish champions Blue Magic, Northern Ireland league winners Sparta Belfast as well as Manchester Futsal and Bloomsbury, England’s Champions League representatives.

Final warm-ups then came against Dundee side FC33 and Fife-based Futsal Escocia.

Now the task is to dispel an unwanted tag given by media in Slovakia.

“The last two qualification groups we’ve picked up points – we beat Lynx two years ago and drew with the top seeds Gentofte last year,” Kyle said.

“So we want to do similar, we want to get points on the board.

“We want to compete in all three games. Looking back at last year, we want to impose ourselves on the games a bit better.

“Last year we conceded the joint-least in the third and fourth placed teams across the whole competition which is good. But we also scored the least so want to keep that defence but pick our moments to get at teams more.

“We’ve already been labelled by one of the other teams as ‘hammer-throwers’ in the local newspaper in Slovakia!

“So we want to show we can play a bit.”

The matches will be streamed live at 3pm Wednesday, 6pm Thursday and 3pm Saturday on YouTube.